Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York (2010), also known as HONY is best known as a popular photo blog. Its premise is simple: Stanton snaps street portraits of individuals he interviews, and uploads them with a snippet of their conversation. HONY can be recognized as a collection of life narratives; because by capturing a glimpse of an individual’s life, Stanton captures part of their identity. By reconciling thousands of lives vastly different from ours and broadcasting them to a vast audience, HONY alludes to Schaffer and Smith’s introspective of life narratives in Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights (2004),
As people meet together and tell stories, or read stories across cultures, they begin to voice, recognize, and bear witness to a diversity of values, experiences, and ways of imagining a justsocial world and of responding to injustice,inequality, and human suffering (1).
In a post on HONY’s official page, Stanton praised the community as “a special group of people” who is “largely composed of people who try to choose compassion over cynicism”. Facebook comments are automatically sorted by the number of likes they receive. As a long-time HONY follower, an uplifting fact is whenever I return a couple hours later to a post, all the disparaging comments will be replaced by positive ones.
In HONY’s latest post covering a same-sex couple who had a son by surrogate, the comment section is filled with an outpouring of congratulations and heartwarming stories. If sorted by most recent however, we would see the section scattered with remarks such as, “The funny thing about the word “straight” is that it infers that the opposite of it is disorderly, crooked, corrupt. Think about that.” The comment received 4 likes. The most popular comment, “I had my son the traditional way but it felt very similar — one day I wasn’t a parent — the next day I was 🙂 You are more relatable than you think!” has 5.3k likes. By bearing witness, HONY’s audience form as put by Schaffer and Smith, “a collective moral commitment to just societies in which all people live lives characterized by dignity,equality, bodily inviolability, and freedom (2)”.
Schaffer and Smith discuss how life narratives having the benefit of a global audience “provide platforms and mechanisms for redress for those whose rights to life, liberty, and security have been denied… (2)” With HONY, its community sees the push for change in action and actively participate in it. In January 2015 for example, they raised $1.4 million for Mott Hall Bridges Academy, a project which stemmed from a single interview with a student, Vidal. The money raised would go on to fund summer programs, college trips, and scholarships. The project received such publicity to where Vidal received the opportunity to meet President Barack Obama, and the principal, Mrs. Lopez, was featured on TED Talks, and became a finalist for The Global Teacher Prize.
Schaffer and Smith refer mainly to literature when they discuss life narratives, but it can be suggested HONY as an online blog possesses a unique feature in its accessibility. HONY’s posts can be uploaded instantaneously and accessed by virtually anyone, as indicated by its 18.2 million Facebook likes and 7.4 million Instagram followers. Its accessibility, and comment section which allows for constant interaction between users has created a thriving online community that bears witness to countless narratives to put in practice a universal conceptualization of human rights.
Referenced Works:
Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. Human rights and narrated lives: the ethics of recognition. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Stanton, Brandon. “Humans of New York.” Humans of New York, www.humansofnewyork.com/.
Stanton, Brandon. “Humans of New York.” Humans of New York, Facebook, Nov. 2010, www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork/.
Stanton, Brandon. “Humans of New York.” Humans of New York, Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/humansofny/?hl=en
Lopez, Nadia. Nadia Lopez: Why open a school? To close a prison | TED Talk, Ted Talks, Nov. 2015, www.ted.com/talks/nadia_lopez_why_open_a_school_to_close_a_prison.
Grinberg, Emanuella, et al. “Boy featured in ‘Humans of New York’ meets Obama.” CNN, Cable News Network, 6 Feb. 2015, www.cnn.com/2015/02/06/living/feat-humans-of-new-york-vidal-meets-obama/index.html.